Mercy me: in praise of gaming's greatest healer

[Administrator]

I've picked a hell of a time to pen a love letter to Mercy. As these words are being written, the Overwatch-playing internet is having kittens over the long-awaited arrival of Doomfist - Talon elder, social Darwinist and a pugilist whose right hooks show up on a seismograph. Doomfist is yet another damnably cool addition to a line-up of damnably cool characters, all of them worthy of a game by themselves. His most terrifying facet may be his passive ability, which applies a fresh layer of overshield for every punch that connects, allowing a rampaging player to weather the concentrated wrath of the other team. But he's still going to need a medic at some stage, particularly if he falls into Sombra's clutches, and who better to supply the juice than a cybernetic valkyrie from Switzerland.
Part of Mercy's thrill is that she actively leans into a healer stereotype many shooters hurry to distance themselves from, a departure possible because Blizzard's stock in trade is not, after all, shooters, but strategy, MMO and role-playing games, where support roles are a honoured profession rather than a tedious odd-job, palmed off on greenhorns. Consider her radiant halo, her saintly smirk, her habit of theatrically enquiring "Must violence always be the solution?" while the team limbers up. Consider her sole offensive ability, a paltry sidearm used to polish off wounded targets when there's absolutely no other option.
From afar this would seem to propagate certain smelly patriarchal ideas about care being a woman's - no, a lady's vocation, but as ever with Overwatch's wanton plundering of pop clichés, there's a degree of irony to Mercy's matronly demeanour. "So that's what it feels like," she declares archly, when somebody takes the time to amplify her damage. In any case, the brilliance of Mercy is that her healing capacities are anything but expressive of some demure gender-normative passivity, a question of throwing down auras and waiting for the team's heavy hitters to drop by. Rather, they unite with her eccentric movement abilities to create a high level playstyle that is, I think, unprecedented in shooters, a blend of agility and aggression which views team mates as handholds first, patients second.
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